I'm sure it is possible to feel very much against snow. I mean, some people are absolutely gutted when it rains. I've met people who refuse to leave the house, (not out of the excuse, which I revel in, to stay in and cook and read and surround myself with soft things and listen to the brilliant head massage that is rain splatter) because well...it's wet out there! There must then also be people who see the snow falling and think, "why always this?" Maybe they wish for rain. Some Bostonians proclaimed at the end of last winter, that snow was ruined for them. And certainly, if the nice people of Bangor sit inside during blizzards and complain to pass the time, there's some odds to be assessed. But I worry often that we don't own enough awe for nature, both for it's seeming intelligence (I'm not sure how else best to phrase it) and for the simple fact that it to some degree, cannot be known.

Personally, I love snow (I love rain, too). What's not to like?

How old was I when I first saw snow, and did all the very human things one does when confronted by the cold sky falling (taste it, touch it, smell it, look at it up close, pee in it)? I couldn't have been older than 12 (once I saw what I can only describe as very soft sleet during recess in Houston. It melted almost before it hit the ground). It's often hard to be excited about something you don't know anything about. I'd heard about snow, seen it in movies, but it looked and behaved on theme park levels of reality. I'm not sure I fully processed that it was not man-made. I didn't think of it much more than I thought about living on clouds (so often, but with very few specifics). But how could I deny the fervor shaking through the hallways at Byrd Middle School. They must know something I didn't. They were bouncing of lockers and linoleum. Eventual word warbled through the hallways that if it snowed during a school day YOU GOT A SNOWDAY! This is a thing? My classmates look up from their doodles of snowflakes and their crushes names in icy caps to nod in agreement.

And thus the part of my brain that fuels excited dancing through the house and the need to buy pajamas so that I could wear them inside out and wake up every few hours to fog up the window from looking out. Both praying for and somehow unable to imagine that it would keep coming down. That couldn't believe how much is coming down, and how it covers everything, and that it was kind of dry, like the boxes of shaved ice in the seafood department of the Kroger. And that it snakes its way into the gaps between pants and socks and shoes, and that it slips down your back when you dive down. And that snowballs can really do some damage, and that the joy of snow angels is less about what is made than about the feeling like pretending to swim in your bed, of being untethered to the rules that parents say that bodies must abide. To move by will and imagination instead of by proprioception and synapse.

And I have it still. Though I do so much less with it. Though I made not one snow angel, threw not one snowball this year. Still I felt I was swimming in snow. The idea of it. The pillowing of the world from my window. The neighborhood gathering to construct towering piles, or rather to strip the bed that had been made. To do the collective wash. Sequestered beings finally able to visit one another, unwind their personal storms while getting something useful done.

Snow makes me pause and take in the fact that all we know can still be buried. The clouds shear and wring out on everything we boldly claim as the domain of man. I like that. I like that the very nature of the universe is unconquerable. I love that no matter how rich the rich get, they are still at the will of lightning storms and the shifting of the plates, that we are precariously placed in a pageant of means in which we are ultimately just participants. ​